The last time that Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson appeared together on screen, they played a Brooklyn couple splitting up (with each other and eventually with Brooklyn) and both received Oscar nominations for their trouble, in Noah Baumbach’s instant classic Marriage Story. That movie screened at the New York Film Festival in 2019, just like the new Driver/Johansson collaboration Paper Tiger, which opens theatrically next month. This is a decidedly different outer-borough marriage story, where Driver and Johansson both have lots of screen time but don’t share that many scenes. In fact, both stars are arguably overshadowed by a third, less-heralded performer.
The New York of Paper Tiger, evoked with rich real-celluloid shadow and grain by writer-director James Gray, is distinct from the imperfect but well-to-do city of Baumbach’s contemporary films. Gray’s movie is set in 1980s Queens, the World Trade Center still looming in the distant background of the film’s opening and closing shots, where engineer Irwin Pearl (Miles Teller) and his wife Hester (Johansson) make their modest but comfortable home with their teenage sons Scott (Gavin Goudey) and Ben (Roman Engel). Irwin’s brother Gary (Driver) lives a supposedly more glamorous lifestyle, though there’s something shadowy and insubstantial about his alleged wealth. He’s a former New York City cop who quit over force corruption, started some unspecified business, made a ton of money, and commenced a more jet-setting businessman lifestyle.
Gary blows back into town driving his customary fancy car and offering Irwin a chance to get in on a new business deal involving engineering-related consultations for cleaning up the areas around the famously polluted Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn. Predictably, but still unfortunately, things don’t go quite as planned; this is not a movie about a couple of Queens brothers happily building a successful business with the influx of Russian-mafia-affiliated property owners in 1980s Brooklyn. Threats and sacrifices are made.
In the broadest outlines, the dynamic of Paper Tiger is familiar: The two men with a lifelong bond, one practical-minded and the other more brazen and charismatic, get in over their heads with criminal types. Gray cleverly subverts that dynamic with his inciting incident: It’s mild-mannered Irwin who acts on impulse, albeit an innocent one. Excited by the prospect of helping businesses on the Gowanus and proud of his new opportunity, he cajoles his sons into accompanying him on a late-evening trip to survey the site. When he strides into nearby offices to warn the Russian gangsters about a safety hazard, he catches them by surprise in the midst of some illegal activity, and though he shows no indication that he’ll tell anyone (or even that he understands he’s witnessed something illegal), the Russians are rattled. They terrorize Irwin and his sons, attempt to extort Gary for supposedly lost money, and the whole thing spirals out of control from there. It’s tragic stuff, but freed of overfamiliar daredevil behavior. Gary is flashy and cocksure, yes, but he’s also the guy more or less trying to go legit, rather than the Mean Streets archetype of the guy who can’t help antagonize everyone. Here, it’s his brother’s goodhearted blundering that brings chaos and violence, an inversion of familiar crimes-that-bind formulas.
Even in top form, Gray’s work remains something of an acquired taste, where dots are often connected in a melodramatic rush. Would Irwin really insist on observing the Gowanus Canal at night, with his two boys in tow, without more specific instructions? It’s obviously supposed to be a moment of unwise pride, yet it’s unarticulated enough that it almost reads as a hint of undiagnosed autism-spectrum behavior — and the movie never really addresses it (or why it would so enrage the Russians) either way. Similarly, Gary’s business-deal bona fides are murky; he obviously isn’t as wealthy as he initially appears, but was he ever? And if so, how? (And even if not… still how?) For that matter, what is Irwin’s actual job when the movie begins? We never see him at work, but he’s not in a desperate financial situation, either. Characters must avoid asking obvious questions because the screenplay requires thematic heft and lofty ambiguities.
Given all that, Paper Tiger still blends Gray’s sociological interest in criminal enterprises with his own autobiographical notes better than many of his films, particularly Armageddon Time, to which this serves as a companion piece. (In fact, it began as a possible sequel to that project.) He always hires good actors, but the performances here are especially strong — and not necessarily in ways that you would expect. Johansson’s character emerges into the narrative more slowly with a heartbreaking subplot that feels more lived-in than some of the more crime-related shenanigans, which goes a long way toward mitigating her reusing an Noo Yawk accent she typically saves for more comedic roles, often on Saturday Night Live. Her onscreen ex (and fellow ace SNL host) Driver seems to understand the precise level of smoothness where Gary attempts to operate, even if it’s not always clear to the audience.
The surprise, though, is the somewhat lower-wattage actor placed in between these two famous ones: Miles Teller, who all of a sudden has accelerated into dad roles after floundering a bit in between the young-adult brashness of The Spectacular Now and Whiplash and the questionably grown-up fantasies of The Gorge and Eternity. Not too long ago, he was given the thankless task of playing youthful second banana to a resurgent Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick, the kind of part that’s supposed to represent a coronation but felt, with Teller, like a demotion back down to Promising Newcomer. (And even there, Glen Powell stole some of his thunder.)
Teller made his name on a likable, mischievous but wounded insouciance, something that can be hard to translate into those more grown-up roles. He looked particularly out of place in Eternity, unsuccessfully miming an old man’s sensibilities in a younger body. But in Paper Tiger, as the dorky, tinkering, proud father of two teenage boys, he feels like he’s aged a decade in just a year or two, and he’s note-perfect. We’ve seen countless movie characters who get into hot water for the sake of their family, to the point of it becoming an easy cliché. But Teller’s Irwin is a particularly vivid and believable case of a man who takes endless pride in providing — who truly isn’t seeking glory or riches so much as the opportunity to better-engineer his family’s future, even as less predictable forces work, unbeknownst to him, to take things away.
It’s enormously touching work, even more so given where the movie ends, and what we else we know is coming for this family: not a doom-y Armageddon, but certainly more heartbreak.
Johansson and Driver doing another movie together may be the marquee event, but Paper Tiger may ultimately be remembered as the first movie in whatever Teller’s next phase turns out to be.
